


Phenomenonologist

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, POV Outsider, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 22:51:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9406499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: The islet town of Yarrow's End has exactly three claims to fame: some Canadians who came and died, those bizarre rock formations, and the witches who live in the stone cottage on the bluff."They're not witches, they'realiens,"Clover's sister insists, but she's the older sister and Clover's going to listen to her, oh, never."Witches," she retorts. "And I'm going to talk to them!"





	

**Author's Note:**

> For [Jaspis Week,](http://jaspisweek.tumblr.com/) Day 6: Beach Day.
> 
> I intended this to come out as a light, fluffy outsider POV piece, sort of Diane Wynne Jones meets Ponyo-by-the-Sea, but ... ehh. *gestures helplessly*
> 
> Canon compliant up to **Gem Harvest** only, but contains no major spoilers.

*

 

For as long as Clover's ever known, everyone in Yarrow's End has told her that the two women who live in the stone cottage on the bluff are witches, and to leave them alone unless you want to wake up covered in barnacles.

"That's ridiculous," Clover's sister tells her, and plants her heels so she can drag the big plastic tub out of the closet.

She upends it, and Clover watches with clinical curiosity as old boots and scarves and ugly knit hats none of them ever wear go spilling across the carpet. Her sister, holding one lonely glove like it's an assembly manual and she needs to find the other part, starts rummaging, turning a mountain of spare winter parts into a squashed-looking hill. Clover gets down on the carpet, legs folded criss-cross-applesauce, and pounces on the hats as they come tumbling her way.

"I _mean,"_ Sage says, clearly wanting Clover to argue with her and getting annoyed that she isn't. "Any idiot knows they're not witches, they're _aliens."_

Clover, busy trying to pull each of the hats onto her head all at the same time, doesn't answer.

Sage shakes the glove in her direction.

"And you can _tell_ they're aliens because they're guarding a top secret alien landing site! They're only tolerating us living in the same town until their spaceship comes back for them."

Here's the thing, though:

Sage is Clover's _older_ sister, which means she says all of this in that _exact_ tone that guarantees Clover will never listen.

"Uh-huh," she agrees, unconvincingly, trying to shove a hat with ear flaps over the small tower of beanies already suctioned to her scalp.

Sage squints. "What are you going to do with those?"

Honestly, Clover hadn't thought about it much past "see how many I can get on my head."

She scrambles to her feet, struck with inspiration. "I'm going to put them in Hamster's cage!"

"Is Hamster … the snake?"

Not one of the cool marsh snakes, just a timid black pet store snake who gets squeamish whenever Clover tries to feed her mice, like perhaps that's a little too much and would she consider the crickets with the calcium powder? Those are more her speed, please and thank you.

But you can't put knit fabric in a reptile cage - or you shouldn't, anyway, that's what YouTube says.

She wrinkles her nose. "No, Hamster is the ferret! Snake is the hamster."

"Sooooo … does that mean Ferret is the snake?"

Clover moves past indignant straight into offended, because come _on,_ Sage thinks she's so smart? "No! She's Galadriel," called Gilly for short.

"Whatever."

 

*

 

Anyway.

So the witches, right?

Mom talks about them the same way she talks about the marsh snakes that everybody says spit poison (and Clover finds out that actually, they only do that when provoked, which is why you should be extra careful if you go into the wetland at low tide during nesting season,) except Mom tends to exaggerate their danger, usually when she's trying to get Clover to come inside. 

_The rain's getting serious, Clover, you don't want to step on a snake, I won't come rescue you when you get spat on and die!_ or, _you get in here right this second or I'll let the witches get you!_

Naturally, being told to avoid them makes Clover want to do the exact opposite, because most dangerous animals aren't all that dangerous, really, if you just know how to approach them. And Clover's watched a lot of documentaries on Mom's tablet - not about witches, specifically, but the principles should be the same.

 

*

 

As far as she can tell, the only reason everyone assumes the two women who live in the cottage on the bluff _are_ witches is because there's no obvious way to get to them.

Yarrow's End is shaped like a bird's nest, albeit a bird's nest that had gotten rained on and turned kind of soggy - or like the first and only time Clover was allowed to try the pottery wheel at the summer art's fair, and came out with a lopsided bowl because she couldn't get her clay to stop wobbling.

At the highest point of the island, where it's sunny and windswept with wide expanses of rippling grassy fields, there's a lighthouse that's sometimes a B&B, and City Hall (which is only a City Hall when somebody wakes up Agnes Los Altos, the sometimes civil servant, so she can perform a wedding or a divorce. Otherwise, it's just a building they put on postcards.) At the other end of the island, there's the bluff, desolate and sharp and abandoned except for that one inexplicable house lodged among all the crystal. And then there's the town nestled low in between, all sturdy square buildings with their brightly-colored roofs, looking not unlike a collection of eggs held in the protective grip of rock, beach, and marsh.

The sea's doing its job of claiming the bluff: erosion cuts deep crevices out of that side of the island, forcing it to split apart the way slices of cake tend to tip over when you put too much frosting on top. Mom says you can always tell when an incoming storm's going to be a bad one - the cracks in the rock start singing.

(For a long time, Clover assumes that's just because rocks like to sing, but she finds out later that it's the wind, instead. There's a video on the Discovery Channel stream about it - that and all the other natural phenomenon that they used to attribute to witchcraft or mischievous spirits.)

On Halloween night every year, Sage and the older kids camp up there and try to scare each other into going home first, mimicking the wind and convincing themselves the witches are going to come after them.

They think they're being sneaky about it, but Jeremiah keeps an eye on them to make sure they don't come to any _real_ harm.

If there's anyone who can watch you in the dark without you being aware of it, it's probably Jeremiah. ("Clover, baby girl, don't put it like that, that sounds creepy." "Why?" "It … it just does.") Mom calls him a cryptid, which as far as Clover can tell just means he's a very large, hairy man who likes to live alone and doesn't bother anyone and maybe eats leaves?

" _Does_ he eat leaves?" she whispers to Sage on one occasion.

"I don't know," Sage answers impatiently. "You're the animal nut, stick him in a cage and find out."

"You can't make a habitat if you don't even know an animal's _diet,_ you - you _butt!"_

"Ooooo, you said a bad word!"

Either way, where the main road ends is where the older kids like to make their camp, right there by the mailbox.

Past that, the closest thing to a sidewalk or a driveway the cottage has is a narrow finger of rock jutting precariously out to meet the bluff. 

You could clear it if you've got a running start, but on the list of things Clover is never, _ever_ allowed to do, including swimming out past where Mom can see her and eating pork, is **do NOT take that jump!** There's no steady footing, and the rock breaks off too easily. It's not worth it. The mailman won't do it, the utilities inspector won't do it, and the witches never come into town. If it's too dangerous for them, then it's _too dangerous for you, Clover, I'm serious._

The weekenders love it, though. The cottage isn't visible in fog, or rain, or snow, or any kind of weather that isn't what Mom calls METAR visibility level of 10, so the weekenders have a habit of acting like it's a castle in the sky whenever they spot it.

"How do they get mail?" she asks Cheree, who works at the desk in the post office where they also sell real estate.

(That means they sell houses, although Clover thinks that's a funny thing to call it. Does that mean there's unreal estate?)

She wants to send them a card, because that's politer than showing up at their door and asking a lot of probing, personal questions, but watching Cheree's face, she thinks maybe she put too many stickers on the outside of the envelope. She just couldn't decide which looked cooler, the dinosaurs or the culturally significant historical figures - so she put all of them on there.

"Witchcraft," he answers, once he's found the stamp, obscured as it is by the prominent profile of the Middle Eastern man who invented algebra.

Outside the bakery that's also the church - _Leavened Loaves,_ it's called - she tugs on Mom's sleeve.

"What do they do about food? They never come down to the store."

Mom separates the receipt from the "ARE U SAVED" pamphlet and tosses the latter into the trash bin on the curb. "Magic," she says absently.

She asks Mr. Peewee (that's not his real name, he just looks like he should be called that,) because he's the geology guy from Rhode Island, and everybody tells her that Rhode Island isn't a real place: by the time you realize you're in Rhode Island, you're leaving it again, and so Clover thinks he might know a lot of stuff about witchery as well as about rocks, seeing as he's from a not-real place and all.

But that means Mr. Peewee isn't _from_ the island, and that makes him a stranger. Clover isn't allowed to talk to strangers. 

She thinks whoever made that rule wasn't really thinking it through, because everybody's a stranger at some point - how do people stop being strangers if you never talk to them?

So she devises a list of important questions, puts on her best raincoat, and wades down through the marsh to the beach, where Mr. Peewee's digging up crystal chunks and separating them into big plastic tubs with very neat plastic labels - for his paper, he says. He does a lot of stuff for his Paper.

She stands outside his circle of activity and asks, "do you like rain?"

"Not at the moment," he answers, very politely, as the damp, hanging drizzle comes dripping off the end of his nose. Clover considers this, and then lets him have that one.

"Are you afraid that if you don't put effort into your friendships, then your friends won't either and you'll lose all of them?"

"Aren't you supposed to be in school?" Mr. Peewee asks, and Clover isn't sure if that's a yes or a no.

"Do you like dogs?"

"Yes. I have one, his name is Buster. Do you want to see a picture?"

Clover very much wants to see a picture, and tucks her notebook away, deciding right then that they aren't strangers anymore and if he turns out to be weird she could always bite him like Fuzzy Winkerbean does when Sage holds him wrong.

After that day, she feels more comfortable asking him all kinds of questions about rocks and Yarrow's End and rocks on Yarrow's End, and maybe witches, too.

"I wish that wasn't private property, and they would respond to my letters," he says wistfully, peering up towards the bluff. "I would love to study the original growths, get a soil analysis, classify its properties … "

"How do you think they get mail?" Clover asks him.

"I saw one of them flying once," Mr. Peewee tells her, and Clover perks up.

"On broomsticks?"

"On something … _blue,_ but it was very hard to see. Like trying to look at individual rain drops when it's raining. Can someone fly on water?"

"A blue broomstick?"

Mr. Peewee looks down at her. His mouth fishhooks in the corner, tugging.

"Clover," he says. "Are you asking me a leading question? When you ask a question already wanting to hear a certain answer from your subject, it invalidates the results."

"Oh!" Clover says in horror. She very much wants results. "You're right. Witches don't need to fly on broomsticks if they don't want to okay bye!"

But she writes everything down anyway. Observations! Eyewitness testimony! That means _science,_ and _science_ says that they're witches.

"Aliens," she scoffs, shoving her pen through the wire ring on her notepad. "Give me a break, Sage."

 

*

 

The morning after Clover steals all of the hats out of the winter clothes bin, she comes out of her room to refill Gilly's water dish and finds Sage in the doorway with her schoolbag on her feet, furtively tucking the ends of a clementine-colored hijab under the collar of her coat.

They freeze, caught in each other's headlights, and then Sage stomps forward three steps and grabs Clover by the arm, lifting her clean off her feet and hauling her outside, slamming the door behind them.

"Don't tell Mom," is the first thing out of her mouth.

Clover starts hopping from foot to foot. The steps are freezing and she has no socks on.

"I'm _serious,_ Clover," Sage hisses. The scarf covers all of her hair, leaving only the round oval of her face. "She'll make a big deal out of it!"

Mom doesn't wear hijab anymore. "She loves you," Clover says blankly.

"And I don't want her knowing, okay! I want to do this. It's," her eyes drop to the dish in Clover's hands. "It's habitat enrichment. For me. I want to try it."

"That's dumb," Clover decides. It's not habitat enrichment if you wear it to school where people are mean and don't feel comfortable wearing it at home where people aren't mean. Is there something here she's not getting? Does this have to do with Allah? Mom says Allah is unknowable and hijab has to do with your relationship with Allah, which is a whole bunch of Very Big Things Clover has filed away to think about when she is Grown Up.

" _You're_ dumb," Sage snaps back, clearly stung. "You're the dumbest sister. I'm going to school. _Bye."_

She stomps down the steps, and Clover goes back inside, where the carpet is so much warmer on her feet than the concrete had been.

Mom's standing by the hall closet.

Clover freezes.

The front door clicks shut behind her of its own accord, and Mom looks up - she blinks at Clover's bare toes, occupied hands, and the fuzzy hat with the ear flaps that Clover's commandeered for her head because it makes her feel like a wilderness explorer from _Up._

She visibly decides not to comment. "Did Sage ever find her other glove?" she asks.

All the breath leaves Clover at once. She didn't see Sage, then. Or hear them talking. Or - 

"I dunno," she says, edging towards the kitchen.

Mom sighs. Before Clover was born, she'd been a weatherwoman for a news channel in another state - where she lived with her friend and Sage - but then that state stopped existing and she had to leave. Clover sees it in her mannerisms all the time: "I live a 140 characters or less kind of life," she briskly informs people, but Clover's pretty sure nobody in Yarrow's End has ever done anything in 140 characters or less in their lives. They'll still stop her and ask her about the weather all the time, though, since she still has her old log-ins for the METAR sites and the satellites. It's fun to watch her at a computer.

"Hey, Clover," she says, just as Clover reaches the threshold and has _nearly_ made her escape. "I have to go to the mainland this afternoon. Tobias is going to come watch you, okay?"

Clover brightens.

Mom takes one look at the eager expression on her face and immediately moves to head off trouble. "And if you want to go to the beach or the lighthouse, make _sure_ he goes with you. Don't bring anything home!" She turns, and nearly trips over Fuzzy Winkerbean, who's managed to place himself directly underfoot in the two seconds she wasn't paying attention. She curses and Fuzzy streaks off, throwing a baleful, yellow-eyed look over his shoulder. "Anything _else,"_ she adds ominously.

"Sure, Mom!" Clover chirps.

"And _stay away from the bluff!"_

 

*

 

Clover got her start in the STEM field - and honestly, it took Clover a long time to realize STEM was science and cars and other stuff, because she heard people talking about it and assumed it had something to do with plants, like, stems, get it? - because of Sage.

Sage and the older kids take the ferry to the mainland for school, but Clover doesn't. And it's kind of funny how the attitude of the adults change once all the kids have been shipped off-island.

She tried to tell Sage this, but Sage didn't believe her.

(Clover thinks she just can't imagine everyone's lives going on when she's not there to witness it.)

So she went around town, carefully watching everybody - their behavior during weekdays, and their behavior on weekends. She wrote all these observations down, highlighted places where extenuating circumstances might also affect how adults act, and presented them to her sister as evidence, trying to prove her wrong.

(This is how she learns that people don't always accept things that are true, like how people on the island still say that Tobias and Cheree aren't good role models because they were destructive together as teenagers, even though now they do mail and real estate and the most dangerous thing Clover's seen them do is use too much lighter fluid to light the summer bonfires, or the way Mom _still_ won't let her get a tarantula even though Clover's proven she doesn't get bored with the pets she _does_ have nor has she _ever_ mistreated them, come on, Mom, it's been _years.)_

 

*

 

Tobias turns up just as Mom's leaving, and folds himself down from his massive height in order to shake Clover's hand like they were long-time business partners coming to an agreement. This always makes Clover feel much older than her nine years.

"Hi, Tobias," she says. "Want to watch wrestling?"

"No thank you," Tobias answers, sharing a bemused look with Mom as she lets herself out the door, keys jangling. "How's your menagerie?"

"My what?"

"Your animals."

Always happy to talk about animals, Clover takes him on a tour and reintroduces him to all the members of her family - Fuzzy Winkerbean the cat she rescued as a kitten from Jeremiah, who found him while beachcombing for washed-up bombshells and other war stuff. Gilly the snake, the hamster, the ferret, two tiny frogs called Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dumb. She even lets Tobias have the spray bottle so he can mist the frogs' cage down.

"They love that," she confides, watching the Tweedles' throats flutter and the membranes close over their eyes. "Do you want to watch wrestling?"

"No thank you," Tobias answers. "Aisha says you've got your eyes on something new?"

Clover sighs, world-weary. "I want one of the cliff beetles. I think they'd make a great new pet - lots of bugs would! They're very small, don't make noise, don't require a lot of attention. Mom won't even notice they're there. Honestly, they're perfect! But Mom said no to a tarantula and I haven't actually caught a cliff beetle yet."

"Ah," says Tobias, glancing towards the living room.

He's cracking, Clover's sure of it. "Want to watch wrestling?"

"Do you like wrestling?"

"Sure," Clover lies. "Is anybody good fighting today?"

"Well …" Tobias trails off, wistful. "I suppose, if you really want to …" 

Thirty minutes later, he's dead asleep, long spidery limbs cramped up uncomfortably in Mom's armchair and his skull slumped back against the headrest, mouth open wide enough for flies.

Clover triumphantly surveys her handiwork, then darts into her room. She pulls on her sneakers, tugs down the ear flaps of her cap, and grabs her critter-catching kit. She blows a kiss to Gilly, who shifts her triangular head but otherwise doesn't uncoil from under the heat lamp, and sticks her hand in Hamster's cage to trace his long ferret spine and tug one of the knit hats over his hindquarters like she's tucking him into sleep.

"Be good," she murmurs to them all, closing her bedroom door very quietly so it doesn't click. "All right. Let's go see the witches about some beetles."

 

*

 

Clover saw a picture in National Geographic once, of a wave freezing just as it breached over a lighthouse in Maine - jagged points of ice made astonishing starburst shapes, the building itself half-enveloped in white with its light muffled to a glow like a lamp under stained glass.

The crystals on the bluff look like that, like the back half of the island is stuck, perpetually frozen in that moment of explosion.

It's a natural phenomenon found on Yarrow's End but not on any of the neighboring islands, much to the confusion of geologists like Mr. Peewee, who keep saying crystal formations like that shouldn't be able to grow in such exposed conditions, battered by rain and snow and salt water. They insist it's not scientifically likely, even though Yarrow's End is plainly encrusted with the stuff and that does _too_ make it scientifically likely.

You can buy smaller samples of the crystal at the same store with the dead Canadian stuff, and Clover likes to poke around for shiny pieces when she's on the beach. (They're good for keeping your hands busy in your pockets when your mom's talking to a friend at the lottery stand and keeps telling you "don't touch.")

She thinks it must be something similar with the cliff beetles. She can't find them anywhere else on the island but right underneath the bluff, and even then, they never come down to the beach - not even their shells.

Maybe they're attracted to the crystal? 

Can beetles eat rock?

It's just, there are so many kinds of beetle in the world. Millions and millions. At least one kind is bound to eat rock, right?

If Mom won't let her have the tarantula, then maybe she'll let her have a beetle: Clover's seen them flying at dusk, and they're _gorgeous,_ coming in all sorts of vibrant yellows, oranges, and blues. Jewel tones, Mom says.

But first - 

The crevasse.

She stops by the mailbox, which is just the regular tin kind like the ones Tobias and Cheree sell from the post office, propped on top of a pile of rocks, all smooth and round like good wishing stones.

The road is dry and there's no fog. She can see the porcupine growths of clear crystal shooting towards the sky, getting smaller and smaller the closer they get to the road. The autumn sun's turned them a soft, glowing color, like roselight under glass. She can even see the cottage. She's imagined this a dozen times. There's really no better day for it.

Clover takes a deep breath. "Okay," she says.

She backs up, then takes a running head start and -

_Leaps._

Her shoes smack solidly against the stone and she drops, slapping her hands down and pressing herself low so the wind won't blow her off balance in either direction.

She crawls forward until she's left the crevasse a good ten paces behind her, then pops back up to her feet.

_HA!_

She darts an exultant look over her shoulder. Take that!

Feeling very satisfied with herself, she straightens the straps of her backpack, rearranges her bug-catching net, and sets off.

She knows where she's going to start: there are pockets on the seaside cliff where she sometimes sees the big terns congregating. That's usually a good sign - they wouldn't do that unless prey's about, so she starts walking uphill towards the end of the bluff, where the island suddenly drops towards the sea. As she goes, she keeps her eyes peeled for detritus; broken shells, dead beetles or beetle waste - anything, really.

She gives the cottage a wide berth, because …

Well. Because maybe she _is_ afraid.

Maybe a little bit.

What does she _really_ know about witches? What do they eat? People? Is _that_ why they keep themselves separate from the rest of the island?

Probably best to avoid them. Until she has a plan, maybe.

The wind's pretty strong, she notes, as a gust catches her in the back and sends her skidding forward a few steps. She grabs onto the flaps of her hat. It hadn't looked that strong from the road.

Then again, it would be pretty hard to judge - crystal doesn't really sway as much as human girls do.

She's right along the edge now; white shapes pinwheel against the sky like paper airplanes, their trim wings edged with black like someone marked them with Sharpie. So the terns are out, but she still doesn't see any beetles. Down below, the water foams against the beach.

She glances at the sky behind her, squinting. Are those shapes jewel-toned?

Her sneaker slips.

Everything tilts.

With a frantic lurch, she puts her foot down too hard, and the rock simply slides out from underneath her.

" _No!"_ she shouts.

She kicks, scrabbling with her hands, but connects with nothing but air as she tumbles downward, and _down,_ and -

\- there's nothing in her but a very deep sense of annoyance, because after _all those warnings_ about that narrow ledge, it's not even the _BIG DANGEROUS_ crevasse that gets her, but instead it's going to be some piddly nothing cliff like the kind she's been climbing around since she was old enough to start wanting to take care of smaller things.

_Great._

That's just _fantastic._

And then -

A hand catches her.

"I told you," says a voice, and Clover is unceremoniously hauled back up onto the bluff by the back of her coat. "Pay up, I bet you she would slip."

"Yes," says another voice. "But _you_ thought it would be on the side with the warp pad, where the ice doesn't - you know what, never mind, you win. Do you want me to pay you in pop can tabs or those coins with the dead men on them?"

"Pop tabs," the first voice answers immediately. "They're prettier."

Clover lays with her face pressed against the ground, heaving for air and contemplating whether or not she should cry. Does she want to cry? That was kind of scary!

Then she decides she's not going to, and looks up.

There's two pairs of feet right in front of her. One's barefoot and blue - like, all the way blue, not cold-blue or toenails-painted blue - and the other's in shiny black boots.

Then she looks _up._

"Witches," she breathes, astonished. 

Like. She _talked,_ sure, but all she'd really gone looking for today were beetles!

"Hello, Clover," says the blue woman. Her toes are bare and her arms are bare and she's got a plain blue dress on, which the wind has successfully wrapped around her legs. The only thing about her that isn't blue is the pattern of tiny gold stars around her waist.

The other woman is - actually, Clover can't tell, because she's too low to the ground and can't crane her neck back that far, so the only impression she's getting from this angle is that she's somebody who is Big and Tall.

She's wearing stars, too, except hers are on her knees. Is it some kind of witch uniform?

They're both waiting, she realizes. Her mouth pops open.

"Hi," she gasps. And, "thank you!" and "how did you do that? Magic?"

She gets her knees under her and hastily pushes herself to her feet from there, tugging on her backpack and - oh, no, she's lost her net. She puckers her mouth with disappointment and contemplates cursing, but she's only got one _really_ good curse word in her vocabulary and she doesn't want to waste it on this.

"It wasn't hard," says the blue witch, distracting her. "I'm Lapis, this is Jasper. Why are you on our island?"

"I live here!" Clover responds. "Why are you on _my_ island?"

"You're shaking," observes the second woman, "are you all right?"

Clover jerks her head towards her. She looks up - and then has to keep going.

"Wooo _oooah,"_ comes out of her involuntarily, because she's taller than Tobias! She's taller than anyone Clover knows, and Clover starts to rock backward just to keep her face in her line of sight - 

Immediately, a hand materializes behind her back, just as she starts to tip.

Clover blinks, and blinks again. A sense of dampness starts to seep through her coat, and the hand gently pushes her forward a few steps, so she's no longer in danger of falling off the cliff. It puts her toe-to-toe with the witches.

The hand is made of water.

"Oh my - " Clover gasps, and dives into her pocket for her notepad.

 

*

 

It turns out their magic comes from the jewels embedded in their skin.

" _How?"_ Clover squeaks, dancing in figure-eights around Lapis and inadvertently dodging her attempts to examine her for injuries. _Stop wiggling,_ says her expression, and Clover would love to, honestly - writing and wriggling at the same time is proving difficult - but she can't. "Why? Are they foci? Is that the right word? Do you channel spells through them? Is magic difficult? Is that why we can't do it? How do you - "

The rushing noise is the only warning she gets, before Lapis bends her knees and springs. A pair of wings catch her mid-leap, blooming from her shoulders in an amorphous configuration, not unlike the bubbles in a lava lamp Clover saw once on Cheree's bookshelf.

She lands ten feet away, and glowers when Clover simply bumbles after her.

"What else can you do?" she presses. "Is it - "

"She can do anything," the second witch interjects. "Trust me."

Clover stops bouncing. She's been avoiding looking at the woman - Jasper - because there's just _too much_ of her and Clover's having a hard time getting her brain to register her as _real._ It's like someone took a cookie-cutter and made the shape of a person, only to take it out of the oven later and find that while baking, the dough had swollen into something indistinguishable from its original shape; big head, blown-up hair, colossal shoulders. Even her hands look too large to be real.

She swallows.

But her mouth pops open of its own accord.

"What about you?" she peers up at Jasper. "Can you do water magic too? Is that why you live by the sea? Are there other witches who can do different things? Why did you pick water? Can - "

Jasper exchanges a look with Lapis, whose shoulders twitch in an irritable shrug.

Clover takes two smart hops backward as Jasper steps towards her, but all Jasper does is drop into a crouch. She's got an orange gem stuck smack in the middle of her face, which seems a really impractical place to have it - what does she do when she needs to sneeze? Where do the boogers go? - and as Clover watches, it suddenly ignites like a lamp warming up.

Light coalesces all around her head, and Clover's jaw drops. She didn't even know light could _be_ solid like that.

For a moment, she thinks it's going to take the shape of a crash helmet, but at the last second, it mutates. Blisters erupt all along Jasper's forehead and down the sides of her face, turning greenish-blue and moldy as soon as they hit the air. It bubbles down her shoulder and left arm nearly to her wrist, hardening until it looks like that whole side of her body is covered with armored plates. The ensemble is completed by the pair of horns that thicken, curling backwards from her temples. 

Altogether, it makes her look like someone had taken a ram and one of those dinosaurs that would fight each other by bashing their heads together, and made a woman somewhere in between.

Clover is _thrilled._

"That's _amazing!"_ comes squeaking out of her like she'd yanked on a rusty faucet. She gushes out a "please-may-I", and Jasper bends her head. Her horns have the same consistency of fingernails, but when Clover knocks her knuckles against them, they thunk in a heavy, solid way. Jasper could probably bash through walls.

"Can you bash through walls?"

Jasper's teeth flash, and she brings her arm around front to form a protective shield, bristling with armor. "I can bash through anything, and nothing can bash through me," she says proudly.

"She's arrogant already, she doesn't need any help, Clover," Lapis remarks from behind them.

"And you're not arrogant enough, I've always told you - "

"I don't _want_ to be."

"Fine."

"It _is_ fine!"

"You're still shaking." Jasper scrunches herself down even smaller, peering at Clover from underneath the scaly growths on her brow. "Are you frightened?"

"I'm - " _fine,_ Clover almost says, but that would be a lie. " - cold," she finishes instead, and then, looking at their bare arms and seeing no goosebumps like the ones that've got to be covering her head-to-toe, "Aren't you cold?"

Jasper looks over her head at Lapis, and they have a quick conversation with their eyebrows that Clover can't interpret.

"Clover," says Lapis, and it occurs to her belatedly: how do the witches know her name? "Would you like to come inside?"

 

*

 

The cottage is made from the same smooth wishing stones that the mailbox is, and it makes Clover want to push on every one of them like they're buttons inside an elevator. It sits lodged in among the most vibrant chunks of crystal on the bluff, its windows set high and narrow like they're trying to keep their heads above water.

Clover's heart pounds.

_No one_ on Yarrow's End has seen inside the witches' cottage. Not even Yokeisha, the utilities inspector, and she's been inside _everyone's_ homes - including Clover's, although she's deathly afraid of snakes so Clover has to throw a towel over Gilly's cage whenever furnace inspection time comes around.

She's going to be the first one to do this, probably. _Science!_

Vibrating with excitement, Clover shoves on the door handle.

The inside is - 

"Aw, man," comes out in a disappointed rush, only to immediately get snatched back as a "oh _wow!"_

She steps over the threshold, the sound of her feet changing as she trods on top of what looks - and feels - like five or six rugs layered on top of each other. It makes for a bumpy, unsteady floor, and sounds _weird,_ although Clover can't put her finger on _why_ it sounds so weird, but it makes her want to keep to the edges of the room, where the rugs aren't so thick. She puts her feet down carefully.

Clutter stacks and winds itself along the walls. Clover peers around, wanting to see _witchy_ stuff - herbs drying in racks suspended from the ceiling, a bubbling cauldron, maybe small tasty children in cages? - but this doesn't look like any of that. It's just regular junk.

But that doesn't matter, because she still sees _magic._

"Oh, wow," she says again, for good measure.

Several multicolored bubbles float near the ceiling. As soon as the door shuts, they rustle and bump against each other, and the jagged shards of rock inside them slowly ignite with a low hum like stringed instruments coming into tune, bathing the room with an illuminating glow.

None of this, however, does anything to distract her from the large, shallow stone basin in the middle of the room. Hieroglyphic scribbles march around the rim, and it's full of water so clear it's like it doesn't exist at all - Clover has to dip her fingers in it and feel its wetness before she can convince her brain that the ripples are real.

On inspiration, she shoves her coat sleeve up to her elbow and plunges her hand all the way down into the pool. 

She expects to touch glass, or metal, but instead her fingertips brush over something … textured. Porous. Cloth, maybe?

_Then where's the water going?_ she thinks, standing up and shaking her hand off.

She cranes her head back, looking towards the ceiling. Dozens of water droplets race down towards the pool as if along strings; as each one plinks upon the surface, it flares with a pinprick of light.

_And where does it come from?_ she wants to ask, except then Lapis steps up, reaching over her head. She strums her fingers across the invisible lines, sending all of the descending droplets shivering into the pool at once. Closing her eyes, she listens for a beat.

"No messages," she reports to Jasper, who grunts and disappears into an alcove, where Clover can just make out the shape of a stove and sink.

"Kettle?" she calls over her shoulder.

"I put it in the purple meep morp." And, "here," she says to Clover.

With a gesture, she forms a net of water midair, which she uses to she sweep up the nearest teetering tower of items, revealing the plastic card table that had been buried underneath. Clover takes this as her cue to sit down, and does so, watching Lapis extract a tea kettle from the pile and toss it to Jasper. It is - she notices - squat, round, and purple, as are most of the other items in the stack. 

Lapis studies the lopsided remainder, frowning, and looks around for somewhere to set it down.

"The closet?" Clover offers, pointing.

There's a single door at the very back of the house, and Clover's eyes glance over it three times before she realizes it doesn't have a handle. Instead, there's a five-pointed star set in the middle; two of the five points are dark, but of those remaining, one pulses yellow, one blue, and the top one a very faint pink, like maybe its batteries are running down.

"Hmm. No. Oh, well," Lapis gives up, encases the whole thing in a bubble, and taps it. It vanishes. Clover makes a noise like she's been stepped on. "It wasn't good art anymore anyway."

"You say that," Jasper rumbles. "I don't know what it means."

"I don't feel anything when I look at it. I think it stops being art when it doesn't make you feel anything."

The horns and scales have cleared from Jasper's skin like they were nothing more than a bad rash. She balls up her fist and bangs it against the stove a few times, the way Clover has to bang on terrariums when she's cleaning them to get the last of the dirt out.

With a muffled screech, one of the coils pops up and then an animal Clover does not recognize sticks its head out of the hole. It braces itself on the stovetop with six fuzzy claws, soot clinging to its ginger-orange fur, and glares balefully upward. Jasper shakes the kettle in a questioning way.

The creature takes a deep breath. Its tubby belly glows, showing a tiny red gem embedded where a navel would be on any other mammal.

Then it belches fire.

Clover almost falls off her chair.

"Thanks," Jasper says, letting the creature descend slowly back into the stomach of the stove. She sets the kettle down over the coil, where Clover can just make out the feathery ends of the flames licking through.

She scrambles for her notepad. "What is _that?"_

"A carnelian," Jasper answers. Then, at whatever expression is on Clover's face, hastens to add, "but just a fragment of one."

"What's a carnelian?" The page she's writing on is creased, dotted with smudged letters that fall right off the page. She has no idea what they say - she hadn't done a very good job writing down observations outside, clearly. Do other scientists have this problem?

"Field medics, mostly," says Jasper, at the same time Lapis says, "Healers."

They glance at each other.

Jasper says, "Red and yellow gems. Not soldiers. They fell out of favor millennia ago, when a Rose Quartz showed up in my Diamond's ranks with the ability to cry healing tears. That was a power that couldn't be matched. By the time I was forged, carnelians had all but faded into obscurity."

There's something in her voice that makes Clover want to hold very still.

"Like a lot of gem fragments left behind from the war, this one fused with the local fauna at some point," Lapis adds. "You'll see them in wild parts - centipeedles, crystal-shrimp, crows. Not as dangerous as corrupted gems, but not … all … _there,_ either."

"Not like us, she means."

"Not anymore," Lapis says, a little ruthlessly.

Insight ambushes Clover out of nowhere. 

She sits bolt upright. "Can they be beetles, too?"

Lapis turns to her, surprised. "The heaven beetles?"

"They congregate wherever there are living gems," Jasper explains, peering over with interest. "They recycle the light we use when we shapeshift or ignite our weapons and use it for repairs."

The cliff beetles Clover's seen are all yellow, orange, and blue - the exact colors, she realizes, that Jasper and Lapis's magic gems are.

"That explains so much," she murmurs, scribbling frantically.

_The beetles are witch bugs!!!!_

_Eat light, not rock!!!_

A moment later - or maybe a few minutes, whatever - a mug lands on the table at her elbow. Steam curls along the top, departing in wisps. Clover reaches for it, drawing it closer. She immediately abandons her pen in order to wrap her hands around it, relishing in the warmth.

"Thank you," she says politely, and then actually looks at the contents. "Um."

Lapis and Jasper, who had turned away in order to exchange a handful of small, sparkling items (are those pop tops? Oh, right, the bet!) stop and fix her with a look.

An intimidated "it's fine!" squeaks out of Clover, followed by, "Um, you don't … cook food a lot, I take it? You're never in town, and … " 

She glances at her mug again, trailing off.

"We forgot something," says Lapis to Jasper.

"No. I don't get things wrong!" says Jasper to Lapis.

They look at each other.

"Sugar!" they yell in the exact same moment, and turn away, disappearing amid their piles of stuff.

"You had it last," says Jasper. "What did you do with it?"

"I put it down somewhere," says Lapis.

"That's useless. You were making shapes out of it, remember? And then eating them. The last one was me. You bit off my head," her voice rusts with indignation.

"You were annoying me!" Lapis flashes back, and shifts another stack to look under it. 

"It's not really - " Clover starts, but peters out unheard, and kicks her feet. The mug in her hands is steaming water. That's it. No tea, no cocoa, no nothing, just water. It _is_ warm, though.

"Found it!" says Jasper. 

Clover stirs a crystallized lump of sugar into her hot water and says thank you. She's rewarded with identical witchy smiles. Mom wouldn't let her have a lump that big in a million years, and Clover knows when to take advantage of an opportunity when it's presented to her.

"So how do you get mail?" she asks.

"A what?"

"Mail. From the mailbox. Wait - !" Oh, _duh._ "You fly!"

That ledge probably isn't much of a challenge for Jasper, either. So what's their excuse for their isolation?

"Oh, that? I used it for a meep morp," and Lapis points. 

Long streams of paper flutter by the window like a mobile over a crib. It looks … exactly like a bunch of catalogues and printer paper, all torn up and glued together. 

Clover stares at it glumly, wondering if she went over there and looked, whether she would see her letter with the stickers all over it. No wonder Mr. Peewee never got a response to his requests to come up and study the crystals.

"Is mail important?" Lapis asks, watching her face.

"Sometimes," Clover says, with the uncertainty of someone who's never received a letter in her life. She's got a godmother in Vermont who gets her a gift card to the Weird Wild Science website every year for her birthday, except she does all that by text. That's the closest she gets. "Just people from town wanting to talk to you, I think."

"Oh." Lapis glances over at Jasper. "Is that a threat? What do they want from us?"

"Who knows? The infestation down there is new. They probably moved in while nobody was doing maintenance on the towers. Are they bothering you?"

"Not really. But we'll have to move them out sooner or later," Lapis muses. "It's not safe."

"We can do that. There aren't a lot of them, so it can't be a very important settlement."

Clover scowls.

"Yarrow's End _is_ important!" she states loudly, despite having never been very moved by this stance before. "One time a bunch of fur trappers came from Canada and set up a fort here so they could trade with people except then they all ate the wrong plant and they died and historians think that was the _first_ European settlement in America, before Roanoke and everything," she finishes, out of breath.

There's a plaque in the middle of town about it, next to a little shop that sells faux fur hats and wood carvings to weekenders.

(You can always tell who the weekenders are, because they're the ones who always feel the need to point out, "Is that why it's called Yarrow's End? But yarrow isn't poisonous!" No, it's not, which means whatever killed the settlers could still be out there and nobody knows what it is! How cool would that discovery be?)

Mom read the whole thing to her since Clover thinks _all_ dead things are neat, if sad, and dead Canadians are doubly neat and sad.

"I think that means if you die somewhere, it's yours," she says thoughtfully.

"In that case," rumbles Jasper, "this whole planet should belong to my kindergartners."

That doesn't make a lot of sense to Clover, but she nods anyway.

"I skipped kindergarten," she volunteers, and jumps when they both wheel on her in alarm. Her hands tighten over her mug of sugar water reflexively, slopping some over her knuckles.

" _Where?"_

"How did you escape injection?"

"Are there more - "

"- which Kindergarten? It couldn't be Beta, I don't know you."

"Um," says Clover helplessly. "I took a test and they said I didn't have to go."

There's a pause. 

Not unlike a balloon deflating, all the high-wire tension slowly drains out of both of them, leaving them hanging limply on their own bones.

Lapis grabs the other folding chair and drops sideways into it; her wings, which had flared open protectively, now droop to the ground and vanish. " _Humans,"_ gusts out of her, and Jasper puts a supporting hand on the back of her chair.

Clover mops up the spilt water with the cuff of her coat, feeling bad.

"Are there … " she fumbles for something that isn't going to panic them. Don't mention school. Okay, got it, school is dumb, anyway - it's something the other kids _have_ to do and are _always_ grumbling about how it's a big waste of time, so Clover is constantly torn between complete indifference and crippling envy.

She looks around, and starts to notice that the piles of junk aren't as random as she first thought.

The one directly across from her is a whole toss-up of items, kind of like pictures Clover's seen on the History Channel app of 1920's gold miners, shaking out pans to look for nuggets. Except these are all … pairs, without their pair. It stings Clover with loneliness, looking up and seeing a single shoe, and a single earring, and the second half of a Titanic VHS, and -

She sits up, shocked.

"Hey!" bursts out of her. "That's Sage's! She was looking for it yesterday!"

Lapis follows the direction of her pointing finger. At the very top of the stack, propped on the end of a single ski, is a single glove.

"Oh," says Lapis. "I like that meep morp. It makes me feel sad, and sometimes it's happy to feel sad about things that aren't really sad."

"Okay," says Clover agreeably. "But can I have that one back? Not the whole thing - just that glove?"

Lapis looks up, contemplating the distance between herself and the top of the ski with a distinctly apathetic air, which makes Jasper heave a pointed sigh. She reaches up, plucks the glove off, and hands it down to Clover with no more effort than it takes Mom to get something off the top of the fridge - a height that Clover simply cannot wrap her head around.

"Thanks!" she says, tucking it into the front pocket of her critter-catching case.

"Who's Sage?" Lapis asks.

"My sister!" Clover responds promptly, and then, because adults get weird about this sometimes, "Well, she's not _really_ my sister, but she lives with us and Mom says she's going to live with us forever, and if _her_ mom wants her back then she can get her life together and come beg."

There, that's usually enough to get people to stop asking. She tugs on the zipper to get it to the side of the bag she wants it on, then reaches for her notepad.

_Thump! Thump!_

Her mug jumps in place twice, and Clover has just enough time to register that's because something enormous is stomping towards her, and then Jasper's huge face drops down to her level. 

"Do _you_ want her as your sister?" she demands. 

Her voice comes out as hard and blunt as a brick to the face. Unnerved, Clover sticks her pen through the spiral wire on her notepad, working it through the other side and trying to dodge that piercing look.

"Ehh," she says unconvincingly.

Jasper's brows hunker down towards the center of her forehead like they aren't satisfied with that not-answer, either, and Clover scolds herself.

Mom always says that when you want to give in and just _hate_ someone who probably doesn't deserve it, just for the satisfaction of doing so, that you should step back and pick _two_ things you don't like about that person. Limit it to two. And then think of two things you _do_ like about them and see if you still want to hate them after that.

_Hate takes a lot of energy, Clover,_ she says. _Make sure it's worth it before you tire yourself out._

Sage's problem is that she thinks she's right about everything and she _still_ doesn't know that The Hamster von Hammyman is the ferret and Ole Snake-Eyes is the hamster. Or maybe she does know and just doesn't care to get it right. It annoys Clover on a _daily_ basis.

But - 

But sometimes when Clover wants to microwave popcorn or when the sink starts dripping while she's trying to refill everyone's water dishes, it's nice to have someone who will help her out.

"Yeah, I guess," comes out of her reluctantly.

"Then she's your sister," Jasper tells her, still weirdly intense.

"Ooookay," Clover says, uncomfortable.

Then Lapis says, " _Jasper,"_ in a tone she can't identify, and Jasper obediently rises to her feet, lofting that scary expression far away from Clover's general eye level. She walks around to the other side of the dripping pool, still stomping hard enough to make everything jump; now Clover gets it, just how much effort she'd put into being quiet before.

Still -

Her tiny exhale of relief suddenly catches in her throat.

Oh, _no,_ she thinks, groaning. Duh, _that's_ why Sage had been so weird about being caught in hijab this morning! She wouldn't want Mom thinking she's doing it because she thinks she _has_ to in order to be part of the family, and if she decides she doesn't want to wear hijab after all, she doesn't want Mom taking it as a _rejection,_ either.

"Are you all right?" Lapis asks worriedly.

"Yeah, fine," says Clover, and then, "Sage doesn't think you're real witches," and _that,_ at least, Clover can bury. Observation. Eyewitness testimony. _Science._ She's got one water-witch and one … dragon-witch, maybe? "Are there any more of you?"

Another quick conversation between eyebrows.

"Just us," Jasper says roughly.

"And the fragments," Lapis adds. "Someone's got to look out for the fragments. They didn't do anything to deserve being trapped like they are."

"Okay."

Like, trapped in the stove? Or trapped in animal shapes?

"You didn't always live here, did you?" she presses. 

Someone told her that - maybe it was Agnes Los Altos, the sometimes civil servant but full-time cozy mystery reader, who said that nobody lived in the crystal cottage that nobody could get to until one day, suddenly, they did.

"No," Lapis answers. "We had another place we lived, but it became too well known, so Jasper and I relocated to this temple so we could be ready in case of an emergency."

"We're on top of a communications tower," Jasper says. "All those sharp crystals pointed towards space? Some of them are broadcasters, and some - " she jerks her chin towards the dripping cascade of water droplets, eternally falling towards their clearwater pool. "- are receivers, so we're always ready in case of an incoming message from our Homeworld."

Something in her tone tells Clover it's not the _Homeworld_ they're waiting to receive messages from.

She glances at her notebook. A lot of this adds up to … well, to _aliens,_ doesn't it?

Furiously, she scratches out "Homeworld." And "space." Sage never, ever pays attention to her observations, but if she did she would leap on that in a heartbeat.

"Is that where all the other witches are?" she asks.

"Yes, fighting for our people's freedom. And Earth's."

Clover scoots to the edge of her seat.

"There's a witch war?" she asks, mesmerized. "You're fighting a war?"

"Trying to stop a war," Lapis corrects. "They sent themselves out on a diplomacy mission. Steven wants the Diamonds to change their ways - it's killing our home." She casts a swift glance at Jasper, who shows teeth, and not in a very smiley way. "Our old planet, I mean."

Clover blinks. "That sounds serious. How long have they been gone?"

"Fifty years," and this time, there's no mistaking Lapis's tension. Her shoulders bunch together like a boy scout's knot, and Jasper's jaw clenches.

"You don't want to fight?" Clover presses, and mimes punching, _pow pow!_

"No," Lapis says flatly.

"Not really," Jasper adds.

"Oh," says Clover, and then she shrugs. "Okay."

 

*

 

A few years ago, when Sage wasn't permanently theirs yet and Mom went to the mainland almost every day to crosscheck, copy, and sign paper after paper so that "no one can overturn this except you, baby girl, I don't want to leave a single loophole that someone's gonna use to tell you that you don't belong," they always ate dinner late, and it was almost always the same meal.

They called it Grabby Hands, which meant it was one big pot of stew that had simmered on low all day until it had mostly turned to mush. Mom would put it on a trivet in the center of the table and the three of them dug in with spoons or pieces of bread.

Clover loved it because she didn't have to clear her plate - there wasn't any plate, she just ate handfuls until she wasn't hungry anymore.

It was just … nice, the three of them giggling and bumping each other's hands and trying to see who could get the biggest scoop from the pot to their mouths without spilling any.

And then Sage came home from school and said double-dipping was unhygienic and insisted on having her own bowl, and Mom looked a little hurt but soon they were all eating out of bowls, and that was okay, too, but Clover still thinks the other way was more fun.

As she sits there in the witch's cottage, slowly sipping at her mug of cooling sugar water and watching Lapis and Jasper move around each other and the meep morps, the memory of it keeps surfacing from somewhere low in her belly. They remind her of it. Everything they own seems to be one big pot, and they share. Even their sentences come from the same mush.

" - the sky arena?"

"I'm still hunting for more turquoise. It's crumbling quicker than - "

" - than even the biggest turquoise mole fusions can fix. Got it. Hand me - "

" - do I get a please?" 

"No, but you get a thank you."

" _Lapis."_

Lapis makes a rude flatulent noise, and Jasper rolls her eyes towards the ceiling.

"What does a communications tower look like?" Clover blurts out, and they dart distracted glances at her, like they'd forgotten she was there - like she was something else they brought in and stuck on top of a meep morp. She sits up straighter, holding up her chin and wondering if she's what art is supposed to look like.

"You wanna see it?"

"Jasper!" Lapis scowls, and her expression grows fiercer when Clover nods furtively and Jasper stands up. "Don't, you'll mess up my piles!"

"Then be careful when moving them," Jasper tells her reasonably.

A thundercloud passes over Lapis's face, but she hops to her feet and lofts her arms up like she's directing an orchestra. Everything in the room jumps, scooped up as easy as a set of marbles - including Clover and the table. She yelps, grabbing on to the edge of her chair. Water swamps over the toes of her sneakers, and her mug hops out of her hands but somehow doesn't fall off the table.

It leaves nothing touching the floor except for the rugs - now clearly visible in all their stained, mismatched glory - and a single Roomba, which beeps with alarm at having all of its obstacles suddenly removed.

Jasper goes and picks it up. "Can you hold this?"

"Sure," says Clover, and the Roomba gets deposited in her lap. "Hey, buddy."

"I didn't even know we had that," Lapis says blankly, levitating herself alongside Clover and watching the flat little machine scrabble its wheels against Clover's corduroys.

Jasper crouches. "Ready?" she asks at large, and then she digs her nails under the edge of a rug, right where it meets the wall. Her shoulders bunch, the rugs flop in protest to being lifted, and then with a single movement, she grabs them all and rolls them up like Sage does with squares of different kinds of cheese right before she eats them. The tube of rugs bangs against the far wall.

Clover's eyes bug out of her head.

" _What - "_ she gasps.

Underneath all those rugs, the floor is made of _glass._

And below that … 

A huge, hollow cavern opens directly beneath them, as dark and wide as a bowl left underneath a sink. _That's_ why their footsteps had sounded so weird, trudging around the cottage - it's like walking over a lid!

The cavern extends so far down Clover can't see the bottom. Musty darkness obscures everything past a certain point, but it's got to go even deeper than the island does. Clover remembers watching a clip on National Geographic about this kind of phenomenon, and it probably means that the cavern was here first, and Yarrow's End grew over it and buried it.

"Those are the communication towers," Jasper points out.

A ring of marble minarets rise towards the glass bottom, tapering to a single point directly underneath their feet. As Clover watches, water dripping through the cloth at the bottom of the cottage pool touches the top of the tower. It ignites a groove in the stone, running down towards one of the supporting pillars, and then dims as it drops out of sight. Another droplet races down a different track. Lighted lines dance back and forth between the rock, like keys lighting up on a piano to show the note being played.

Lapis looks down through the floor, her expression inscrutable.

"Almost all the other communication towers were destroyed a long time ago, to keep Homeworld from realizing rebel gems still lived on Earth," she says. "After awhile, that became a moot point, but we maintain this one."

"Just in case," Jasper adds.

Her face isn't as hard to look at anymore. All of her expressions are as huge and exaggerated as the rest of her, overcooked, making her easy to read. Clover tracks the direction of her eyes: Lapis's face is more like stillwater, the changing lights from the towers playing off the dark, midnight-colored freckles that dominate her nose and cheekbones. 

_She misses the other witches,_ Clover puts the pieces together. _And Jasper doesn't know what to do about it, so they just wait for the towers to ring._

"How come you never come into town?" she blurts. "There's … ice skating, and barbecues in the summer, and sometimes we put on shows for the weekenders where we all get to pretend to be Canadian and we eat and drop dead all over town. I think you'd have fun! It's …"

She trails off. Both Lapis and Jasper are smiling at her, in that way adults do when they think you're cute but don't have any intention of taking you seriously.

"I … don't really get along with them," Jasper says, in a tone Clover instantly recognizes as, _they don't get along with me._

"Why not!" she bursts out, indignant. 

"Because of everything she is as a person," Lapis volunteers.

" _Thanks,"_ Jasper tells her, in a way that doesn't mean thank you at all.

Lapis shrugs. "They like me just fine. Why do you think I avoid them?"

"I - " Jasper starts, and then stops, and looks at Lapis like she said something completely different.

Clover tracks back and forth between them.

"Okay," she says, her grip on the Roomba relaxing as it slowly starts to accept its fate. And then, "can you put me down now?"

 

*

 

It turns out that door at the back of the house does _not_ lead to a bathroom, either, and after getting nothing but blank looks when she tries to ask the witches how they … you know … go _pee,_ Clover realizes this could be another _experience._

"Never mind, I'll figure it out!" comes out of her, very fast, and she scoots out of her chair and beelines for the front door before it occurs to them to be adults and stop her.

Peeing outside is much colder than Clover was anticipating, and it takes her several minutes of hunting to find a likely-looking bush still trying to make a go of it among all the crystal, scraggly but large enough for privacy. This isn't something she could have gotten away with at home in a million _years,_ and she hikes up her pants and redoes the button, rather triumphantly. She feels connected to all those women who trekked across deserts and prairies and had to pee behind bushes, too - of course, they were probably in dresses and didn't have to do the awkward one-leg-in, one-leg-out thing.

She heads back towards the cottage, winding her way under and around the giant crystals, when the sound of voices stops her.

The maze surrounds her on every side, sharp glittering points all reared skyward. It distorts the noise, and Clover turns in a full circle before a flash of blue in her peripheral catches her attention.

Lapis is at the edge of the cliff, not far from where Clover almost fell.

Her blue head turns, eyes following something Clover can't see, and a beat later, Jasper materializes beside her. Lapis reaches out, grabbing her hands and maneuvering them so that Jasper's bulk blocks most of the wind. Jasper tolerates this the same way Mom does whenever Sage or Clover elbow her out of the way so they can see something better, like she's resigned to her fate.

Clover darts a look around, then ducks behind an outcropping of pale, opaque crystals highlighted the same, oft-washed grey of the sky.

She peeks out, watching Lapis wrap her arms around herself.

"I forgot," she says, and Clover braces her hands on the crystal, leaning forward to hear better. "They don't last very long, do they?"

"They're organic, Lapis," Jasper responds. "Organic things rot."

"But after fifty years, Steven and Connie would be - "

She cuts herself off, and bows her head. Clover sees her shoulders cave downwards and thinks she must be hurt - did something hit her? The wind tugs at her skirt, whips at the fringes of her hair. Jasper doesn't even attempt to control how it tosses hers.

Then Lapis looks up, and Clover can tell by the look on her face that her words are being scooped out of her, raw as pumpkin guts.

"I want to see them again. Humans don't last forever."

She's saying something else entirely, Clover can tell - something she's afraid to put into words.

Jasper doesn't have that trouble.

She leans against the wind and asks her, "Do you want to go after them?"

Lapis doesn't answer for such a long time that Clover starts to forget she's eavesdropping; she's sitting on her foot wrong, and it's turning to pins and needles underneath her. She shifts around, trying to stave off that uncomfortable staticky feeling, and as if in punishment, her nose begins to itch with an oncoming sneeze.

Then Lapis speaks again, and Clover grabs her nose to keep quiet.

"We should _never_ have let them leave without us." Through her watering eyes, Clover can just make out the look on Lapis's face, her expression as lacerated as broken glass. "They should have had us as back-up from the start. Even Peridot - "

"Peridot had her reasons for returning to Homeworld," Jasper cuts in, gruff in the way people get when they're trying to be kind but don't have a lot of practice with it. "You would know them better than me. And the Crystal Gems wouldn't have gotten far without her help."

"We could go," Lapis insists. "We have the equipment. We can catch up to them. I could help them, and you could - "

Jasper suddenly goes very _sharp,_ her eyes and her teeth and her attention all narrowing to a dangerous point. It's the same look she'd given Clover when she was talking about Sage.

She asks, "I could _what?"_

Lapis shrugs, unintimidated. "You don't have to fight with us, I know how that makes you feel. But you've got your own unfinished business on Homeworld."

At that, Jasper steps in, closing the last bit of distance between them, and when Lapis cranes herself backward to keep her in her line of sight, she drops to her knees. It chops a solid three feet off her height, but even that barely makes her a handspan shorter than Lapis.

Her face turns up, and with that same ferocious intensity, she says, "And I'd _take care of that business._ I'd fight my battles, and then I'd fight yours too! As long as they last!"

She extends her hands, palms up, and without a moment's hesitation, Lapis lays hers over them.

"Wherever you go, I go, Lapis. I am no oath-breaker."

"I know that," Lapis says quietly, and, "I believe you."

She takes her hands back, wrapping them around Jasper's shoulders. Jasper, in turn, slides hers up to hold Lapis around the waist, her head coming forward to rest against Lapis's sternum. Lapis kisses the top of that white head, momentarily obscured by her cloud of hair.

"But we won't," she says, so softly the words don't even register in Clover's brain for a moment, made indistinguishable from the wind, and by the time she does sort out what was said, Jasper's already speaking:

"When the Crystal Gems save that planet - _when,_ Lapis, I don't doubt them - I learned the hard way not to do that, how do you think I wound up in this situation? - the remains of the Diamond Authority are going to flee for the colonies, looking for somewhere to regroup. We're here to make sure they don't come to Earth. And who's going to protect Earth if we're not here?"

"It's really that important to you?"

A pause.

Jasper props her chin against Lapis's chest and meets her eyes.

"There are only two things that matter to me. You, and my home."

It comes out so matter-of-fact that Clover finds herself nodding, accepting it as if she'd heard it on a documentary, or like the way Cheree closes the post office/real estate building early on Thursdays so he and Tobias can watch WWF even though he hates wrestling and knows Tobias will be asleep twenty minutes in, like the way Mom says "of course we will" when Sage, fidgeting, asks if they're coming to her play even though it's kind of small and silly and none of the costumes are good. Like there isn't a doubt. Observation. Eyewitness testimony. Pure, irrefutable, scientific _fact._

Humor warms Lapis's expression; that awful bleakness cracking and falling away, like glaciers do on time-lapse videos.

"There are a few more things than that," Lapis says.

"I do really like the shows where humans knock stuff down," Jasper admits reluctantly. "I would be sad to leave that."

Lapis laughs, and leans down to her with her mouth open, and Clover decides that _yikes,_ that's enough, they're being gross now.

Wrinkling her nose, she slides to the ground, hopping a few clumsy steps on her numb foot. She slowly starts back towards the cottage, feeling betrayed that even witches don't seem to be immune to _that_ nonsense. 

A _click-click-click_ sounds out from right behind her.

She freezes.

_Click-click-click,_ it comes again, a dry raspy noise like Agnes Los Altos tsking whenever Sage and the older kids do something she finds reprehensible. It's _so_ close, like it could be directly underneath her ear.

Slowly, her head creaks around.

She sees mandibles first, blurring into two sets with their proximity, and then an exoskeleton the same bright clementine color that Sage's hijab had been. A small, hairy leg clings to the seam of her coat sleeve.

_Cliff beetle!_

Or heaven beetle, or - or - or _whatever_ they called it!

_Right on her shoulder!_

Clover begins to tremble with excitement, and jitters back and forth in place for a moment, trying to decide what to do. Her net fell off the cliff and her critter-catching supplies are inside the cottage, useless to her, and she doesn't want to make any sudden movements in case she scares it off.

She stares at it in her peripheral for so long her eyeballs start to hurt, and then begins to walk sideways like a crab, trying not to move her upper body too much.

"Psst!" she hisses, when she thinks she's gotten close enough to the witches to get their attention. " _Pssst, look!"_

For a moment, nothing happens, and Clover lets herself be annoyed - they can suck face later, this is important _now!_ \- and then a shadow falls across her.

"You found one," Lapis remarks, and she reaches out, scooping the beetle off her shoulder. "Here."

She deposits it in Clover's hands, and Clover's feet skitter in place of their own accord, a near-jig of unparalleled delight. The beetle scuffs back and forth across her palms, feet hooking at her skin like a cat's tongue.

"Heaven stones," Jasper adds, pointing. The beetle's horn does, in fact, crest back towards its back, hanging heavy with a stone not unlike the one that had been in the carnelian's belly. "It absorbs gem-light and turns the same color as camouflage."

On impulse, Clover holds the beetle up against Jasper's bicep. Except for her own dark fingers and pale palms, it all but disappears, the colors blending perfectly.

Jasper shows teeth. "Wanna see something cool?"

"Yes!" 

"Jasper," says Lapis warily, but Jasper just transfers her grin to her.

"Stay right there," she tells them, and stalks back to the lip of the cliff. Without breaking stride, she clamps a hand over the edge and swings down out of sight.

Clover shouts in horror, cupping the beetle in her hand and racing after her, peering down frantically. The toes of her sneakers kick pebbles over the edge, sending them sailing down towards the white-capped waves.

Jasper clings to the cliff-face below her, with seemingly no more effort than it takes Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum to stick to the sides of their cage. She hops along sideways, going hand-over-hand, and stops once in order to untangle her hair from where it's trying to take a tern's nest with it. She's looking for something, and after shuffling along a little further, says "aha!"

"Ready?" she calls up.

"For what?" Clover returns, baffled.

From behind her, Lapis suggests, "Maybe you should step back."

Jamming herself in place with her knees, Jasper cups her hands around her mouth, drags in a huge breath, and _blows_ into the rock like it's a tuba, or like someone presented her with more birthday candles than she can handle.

The cliff explodes.

Everywhere, all around her, out of every crevice, a whirlwind of wings and indignant clicking - 

\- twenty, fifty, _hundreds_ of heaven beetles, thrown across the sky like glittering flecks of sugar; yellow, orange, blue, some even the same red as Jasper's stripes, others the same midnight color as Lapis's freckles. Clover's hands go slack, and the beetle she's holding flips its wings curiously and then buzzes off to join the rest.

A loud whoop tears itself free of Clover's throat, winging itself up after them.

She spreads her arms and dances in place, spinning around and around so the insects all turn kaleidoscopic. Her chest feels swollen, pulled too tight over her ribs like the skin of a drum, like her heart, too, wants to take off and leave the rest of her behind. She is impossibly, incandescently happy.

 

*

 

"What are those?"

"Crabs!"

Lapis frowns thoughtfully. "I thought crabs were red."

"Only in cartoons!" Clover thinks about it, her nose only an inch away from the bubble's surface. "Well, maybe they're red somewhere else, but here they're blue!"

"Some of them turn red when you boil them," Jasper offers from the other side. Clover can make out her silhouette, big and distorted, with her head bent to watch the sea life swim around perplexedly in their suddenly much smaller world.

Lapis's nostrils flare wide, indignant. "That's horrible!"

"Yeah, but the cool stuff wouldn't be so cool if you didn't have the horrible stuff there too, being not cool," Clover says sensibly. "Like that!"

A school of tiny silver fish flash by, catching at the light like grass rippling in the wind, and a larger fish emerges and dashes after them, its mouth open and gobbling. The fish split, the school halving in one smooth movement, and the larger fish fails to single one out from the whole. It chases them uselessly until it runs out of energy.

Lapis lifts the bubble higher, glancing along the underside with concern.

Clover tries to think of another analogy.

"Like, when you do something bad but you don't know that it's bad until somebody _tells_ you, and then you know how to be good. You have to know what bad is in order to know that good is something it's _not._ Like, you know how when adults know you did something but they can't _prove_ it, so they're all," she deepens her voice, "I'm _sure_ the _guilt_ feels _terrible."_ She returns to her normal voice. "Well, apparently when you're an adult, your brain does that all on its own!"

She's not sure how that works. She's nine years old, sure, but she _knows_ it's always better not to get _caught,_ right?

Adulthood sounds weird.

"Anyway! Mom says it just means more, like that. Or, like - " Sage's face suddenly flashes in front of her eyes, her fingers tucking in the tail of her clementine-colored hijab; the misery in her expression when she realized that Clover didn't understand. 

Clover drops her arms to her side. 

"Or," comes out of her, quieter. "Being the best _you_ that you can be doesn't mean as much to you if you don't also know the _worst_ you can be, and - and - choose to not be it."

Lapis and Jasper glance at each other sharply, then drop their eyes.

"I'm going to put the ocean back now, Clover," Lapis tells her.

"Oh!" Clover jerks her head up for one more look, eyes hungrily devouring the section of seawater that Lapis had lifted out so they could see what's inside. She doesn't know fish as well as she knows bugs and mammals, but that's honestly just a matter of exposure.

She follows it to the surf's edge, watching it disintegrate as soon as it touches the waves. The fish and bottom-feeders dart away.

"I like her," Jasper says to Lapis in a carrying whisper, and Clover, realizing they're talking about her, is immediately buoyed. "She reminds me of my kindergartners."

Lapis frowns back. "Stunted and undercooked?"

"No. _New._ Full of knowledge but not enough learning, not yet."

"Hey!" An idea strikes Clover. "Can you turn people into barnacles?"

Another glance. "What's that?"

Clover vents out a frustrated noise, feeling betrayed; all those years of being warned not to approach the witches because you'll get turned into a barnacle … 

"You've lived here for fifty years and you have _sea powers_ and you don't know what a barnacle is?"

"I've been - !" Lapis protests, planting her hands on her hips. "That is, I haven't had … _someone_ always has to be around the communications tower in case - it's … Hm," her eyes slide past Clover, scanning the waves.

Clover waits for a beat, but Lapis doesn't finish her excuses.

"Well, you're here now and it's probably good for you to get involved. A barnacle's a sedentary feeder. They look like her scales," she points at Jasper, who is not, at this time, covered in horns and scales. "Big and … scaly and such. They stick to ships and slow-moving whales."

"Why would we want to turn people into _that?"_

"Uhh. That's just what they say in town. To scare kids and stuff." 

She puffs herself up and tries not to look like a kid.

Jasper tilts her head. "They also tell you not to talk to strangers."

" _You're_ not strangers," Clover retorts, indignant on their behalf. It's like the marsh snakes! They don't spit unless you're being really dumb, but does that stop adults from exaggerating? _No._ "You're island! If they wanted us to stay away from you, then they shouldn't have brought home so many stories about you."

"Stories … ?" Lapis echoes, with a strange look on her face.

Clover glances up at her, and then looks again, and suddenly recognizes the expression: she sees it in the mirror sometimes, when someone's done something unexpected like remember her name or that she doesn't like fruit. It's the look of someone who's always thought it unfathomable to be remembered at all.

"Hey, Lapis," and that's Jasper. "Bubble her."

" _What?"_ Lapis and Clover say, Lapis with confusion and Clover in trepidation.

Jasper cracks her knuckles. "We're going to go find some barnacles for you."

"We are?" Clover says blankly, and then yelps as a fishbowl is abruptly dropped on top of her head. No, wait, it's a helmet, sealing into place. No - 

A bubble!

"Woah!" she reaches up, flattening her hand just outside the barrier and bringing it closer until surface tension causes the water to leap to meet her palm. She drags in a deep, salty-smelling breath, astonished to be surrounded but have no trouble breathing. "That's so cool!"

"This is me, getting involved," Lapis says dryly.

"Arms," Jasper says to Clover, who says "what" again and then squeaks with surprise as Jasper grabs her under the armpits, lofting her effortlessly onto her shoulders. She wraps her arms around the top of Jasper's head and takes a moment to marvel at how _different_ the beach looks from this height.

"Hold on," Jasper tells her. "We're going to cannonball it."

"Witches do _cannonballs,"_ Clover breathes in tones of deep, scientific wonder.

Jasper takes off at a sprint, picking up speed as the soft, windswept sand gives way to hard, water-compacted sand and then waves. Clover watches the ocean approaching with a sense of resignation; she left her coat, hat, and shoes behind before even dragging Lapis and Jasper out onto the beach, and this is going to be _freezing._

Plunging into the water hits her like a brick to the chest. The cold shocks all the air from her lungs, but the bubble around her head doesn't so much as wobble.

Smaller bubbles billow up all around them, streaming from their clothes and hair. Clover catches a glimpse of stirred-up sand and one confused crab before Jasper bobs to the surface again.

She lifts a huge hand, waving to Lapis on the shore. Clover clings to her head, trembling.

"You be careful!" Lapis calls out to them.

Underneath her, Jasper rumbles with laughter.

"I'm not worried!" she shouts back. "It's the ocean, and you're here, aren't you!"

Clover blinks, and looks down.

Even upside-down and through a bubble, she recognizes the look on Jasper's face. It's the exact same thing she sees her in herself and Sage when their mom's around - a willingness to be more reckless, not because they want to be dangerous, but because Mom means safety.

She squinches up her face and says, "you love her," with confidence. 

Jasper's eyes go wide, darting up to her in shock. "I," comes out of her. "Wha - "

And then her smashed-in face softens, all at once.

"I don't like being apart from her, not after everything," she answers, glancing towards the shore and then back up at Clover. "But I don't know if that's love."

"Well, it's not the _important_ part, is it?" Clover says impatiently. "We were just talking about this! It's not about how sad you feel when you're not together, it's how _good_ it feels to see each other again, right? So," she turns it over in her mind, wanting to be fair. "So if that bit's not good, then it's probably not love, no."

Jasper treads water and stares up at her for so long that Clover starts feeling a little uncomfortable. 

Shivering, she hunches down over her slicked-down white hair, trying to present a lower profile to the wind. Fortunately, at that moment Jasper transfers her gaze back towards the island, where Lapis still stands by Clover's stuff, hands shading her eyes.

Seeing them looking back at her, she spreads her arms in the universal gesture of, _what the fudge are you doing?_

And Jasper's whole face crinkles up. Clover feels her laugh with her entire body.

 

*

 

"What is _this?"_

"I have _no idea!"_ Clover replies, completely thrilled.

Jasper holds her hands up to eye level, peering through the cage of her fingers at the bioluminescent creature trapped behind them. Feathery feelers snake out around her nails, bumbling and curious.

"Is it a barnacle?"

"I … don't think so." 

Jasper lets it go and it streaks off, the stripes along its sides glowing and then extinguishing as it darts beneath a boulder.

Clover kicks after it, hoping to see more. Somebody told her once that they're on the wrong side of the globe for interesting marine biodiversity and if you want to see anything worthwhile while snorkeling then you should probably go somewhere tropical. She has to admit they've got a point. Everything they've seen so far is the same winter-grey as the sky and the sea and the plant life on Yarrow's End. It's pretty monotonous.

But no ocean is _devoid_ of life, either, and Clover spots fish after crustacean after fish after finless wormy thing that she doesn't recognize. She files away their sizes, variations in greyscale, and the way they tickle against her fingertips so she can look them up on Mom's tablet later. She wishes she could take notes underwater.

"Oh!" bursts out of her. "There!"

Cresting over an outcropping is a shallow cluster of star-shaped, bone-white creatures. Clover dives towards them, and after a moment's hesitation, Jasper's shadow follows.

"Barnacles," Clover says, and runs her hand over their beaky mouths. The slimy sensation makes her shudder, and she happily chirps, "Oh, man, they're so gross! … hey, Jasper?"

Jasper doesn't come any closer. The look on her face is …

"Jasper?"

"I'm fine," she says shortly, giving her head a shake. Her weightless hair shivers everywhere, ghostly in the underwater gloom. "I know what they are. I've seen them before. They'll grow on … on anything if you … hold it _down_ long enough."

It's that tone again, the one that makes Clover want to hold very still, the way they tell you to do with aggressive animals.

With a frustrated noise, Jasper reaches across herself and claws her fingernails down her own arm, like she's trying to shed something. But she isn't covered in scales _or_ barnacles, so all this does is gouge deep cuts out of her skin.

"Jasper!"

Jasper's attention zeroes in on her, lips drawn up over her teeth.

A beat passes.

Her eyebrows smooth out.

"Your lips are blue," she observes, in her normal ground-up voice. "Swim back up here, we should go."

"I'm f-f-f-fine!" Clover chatters out. "Are you okay?"

Jasper's mouth pulls to one side, and with an easy breaststroke, she closes the distance between them, scooping Clover under her arm like a football.

"You can come back, you know," she tells her, not unkindly, and kicks upwards. "The ocean has been here for hundreds of thousands of years - or whatever, I'm not sure, it was here when I was forged - it'll wait for you to see it again."

And that, the implicit promise that she could go swimming with them again, makes Clover's heart _soar_ like she'd thrown it off the bluff like a paper airplane.

 

*

 

A short swim later, and they're stumbling their way up the beach.

The receding waves suck the sand out from underneath them, sealing their clothes to their bodies. Clover's numb legs wobble once and then cease to hold her upright. She smacks into the sand just in time to catch a wave coming up, swamping under her belly and chin. The bubble over her head pops and she spits sea foam. " _Bleh!"_

Jasper chuckles, picking her up under the armpits again and carrying her out of the tide's reach.

Then she sets her down and starts jogging towards the bluff. 

Clover looks up, following her trajectory, and spots Lapis, who doesn't seem to have moved from where they left her. Clover can see the lumpy shape of her own coat, abandoned by Lapis's bare feet. It looks like the warmest thing in the world, and with a wistful noise, Clover gets up and starts trudging after it.

Lapis, meanwhile, catches sight of Jasper approaching and turns towards her automatically.

Then - whatever expression is on Jasper's face - it makes her stop and say, audibly, "Oh no."

Jasper calls out a warning, "arms!", and Lapis is either quicker on the uptake than Clover or just more used to it, because she gets her arms up in time for Jasper to snatch her by the golden stars around the waist, picking her up off the ground and spinning her around. 

" _Jasper!"_ Lapis sounds more aggrieved than anything, clinging to her shoulders until they slow down. "What is the _matter_ with you!"

In reply, Jasper leans up so that their foreheads touch.

Clover goes around them, gratefully crouching down onto her heels next to her clothes.

She pulls her coat on, which has cooled to air temperature and so isn't very pleasant but still makes her feel better almost immediately, and tries to wriggle her feet back into her shoes while getting as little sand in them as possible. She doesn't miss the look Jasper throws in her direction.

"I'm just glad to see you again, that's all," comes out like gravel.

"We were apart for, like, ten minutes, get a grip," Lapis returns acidly, and Jasper tilts her head in response, a movement that Lapis unconsciously follows.

"Are you - does it make you happy at all when I come back?"

Clover's head comes up.

Lapis pretends to think about it.

"I've got to say, I am glad every time you turn up on the warp pad and nothing's been broken, smashed, or thrown into a canyon - or that nobody's stabbed you or bubbled you. Again."

"Lapis."

Smiling to herself, Lapis settles her weight in Jasper's arms and runs her hand along the crown of her head, peeling back strands of wet hair.

"You know how - " she starts, and then pauses to gather her thoughts, letting her fingertips drift down along Jasper's eyebrows, the strange shape of her nose. "The worst part about loneliness isn't the being alone, really - it's being surrounded by people and they've all got their backs to you. Not because they hate you, they just don't _care_ about you, so you might as well not be there at all. But _you -_ you are always turned towards me."

She presses their foreheads flush together with sudden feeling.

"Yes," she murmurs. "Yes, I'm glad to see you."

The expression on Jasper's face isn't anything Clover has words for. She tilts her chin up, seeking, and Clover abruptly realizes they're about to kiss again.

She jumps to her feet.

" _HI JEREMIAH,"_ she bellows, waving.

Out past the breakers, a familiar olive-green trawler chugs away, empty nets heaped haphazardly in the back and bell clanging as it rocks. The silhouette of a man on board pauses, then lifts a hand in answer.

Clover cranes her head. "Can we - ?" she asks Lapis hopefully.

Lapis considers it.

"You," she says to Jasper, pushing herself off. Her wings catch her and hold her aloft before she drifts down to the sand. "Are going to swim. And you - you're coming with me."

"Oh, thanks," says Jasper, but Lapis is already swooping down.

Third time's the charm, and Clover's got her arms raised, ready. Lapis's hands hook her under the armpits, and she speeds them across the surf, wings pumping to gain lift. Clover scrunches her legs, the toes of her sneakers dancing just above the wave tops. Laughter tumbles out of her mouth, snatched away.

Lapis drops her onto the deck of the trawler and circles once before landing, jogging a half-pace to kill her momentum.

"Hi, Jeremiah!" Clover choruses again, as the wooly mammoth of a man steps out to join them. For a moment, she contemplates playing it chill, but then does the exact opposite and all but bounces over to him, excitement sparking off of her. "I'm hanging out with the witches who live on the bluff, and we're doing mag-g-g-gic!"

The brief time aloft had chilled her wet clothes and set her teeth to chattering again, and Jeremiah's eyebrows tick up a fraction.

He's got an interesting face - it's the same walnut color that Clover sees in the mirror, but he must not do much with it because it's barely got any lines in it at all, even though he's probably as old as Agnes Los Altos and she's nothing _but_ lines. His eyebrows are white and so enormous that his eyes have taken to hiding underneath them, and now they make a brief appearance like something long-fabled coming out of the woods.

He glances at Lapis, who shrugs.

"We're having fun. Getting involved. Beach stuff. Beach summer fun buddies," comes out stiltedly.

Clover grins. "Lapis, it's autumn."

"Whatever."

Something heavy, warm, and scratchy drops on top of Clover's head. 

It's Jeremiah's wool sweater, and she beams, pulling her head through it and wrestling it on over her coat. It goes down to her knees and reeks like island. "Thanks!"

The trawler takes a sudden dip to one side, and Lapis's face goes still and very strange for a moment before it clears.

Jasper hauls herself up over the railing. With a thump, she hits the deck boots-first, and water sloshes against the trawler's hull as it bobbles back the other way. Jasper shakes herself off like a dog. Clover shoves the cuffs of Jeremiah's sweater up past her elbows and goes over, helping her pull two very confused fish out of her hair and toss them back.

Free of wildlife, she straightens up to her full height, and the forestry on Jeremiah's face hikes up a little higher.

"What are you doing today?" Clover asks him, magnanimous in her wealth as the only one on the island who casually _hangs out with witches._ "Cool stuff?"

Jeremiah tips his head modestly.

"What are these?" The deck is crowded with stacks of pallets, swaying with the boat and shedding dirt everywhere.

Jeremiah makes a vague gesture with his hand.

"Oh!" says Clover. "You're going to take them to get chipped but first you need to break them down into smaller pieces but you aren't as steady with an axe as you used to be, so you have to find somebody else to do that."

Jeremiah's lips peel off his teeth.

"How did - " says Lapis faintly from somewhere behind her, and Jasper looks back at her and makes an _I-don't-know_ noise.

Clover looks up - and _up_ \- and feels herself start to grin.

"I think I know someone who can help you with that!"

A beat, and then Lapis and Jeremiah follow her gaze.

"What?" says Jasper, looking back at them. And, "oh! Well, of course it's me," she acknowledges with all the confidence of someone to whom humility is only a recently-discovered concept.

 

*

 

"There!" They heave, and the locker lid slams shut.

Usually used as an icebox to store Jeremiah's catches until he can get to the mainland markets, it's now been temporarily repurposed as a bin for smashed-up wooden pallets. The wood chipper they have in town is probably the same one the dead Canadians used, and it won't take anything much larger than a picture frame.

Clover hops up on top of it and swings her legs, while Jasper scowls and digs a splinter out from under her nail.

_You didn't_ have _to rip them apart with your bare hands,_ Clover thinks, but a fledgling sense of self-preservation keeps her mouth shut.

She checks to make sure Lapis and Jeremiah are out of earshot.

"See?" she says, low. "That wasn't so bad."

Jasper transfers that scowl to her.

"What?" Clover's trying to be cool, but that's still really intimidating. She rallies. "We aren't so bad once you get to know us! And Jeremiah's a good place to start. He knows everybody, and everybody trusts him! He can put in a good word for you."

She blinks. "He … hasn't said a single word this whole time."

"They're rationed," Clover says sensibly. 

"It's fine, little plant. We don't need anything from the humans."

"And you didn't _need_ to show me those big witch towers, or the heaven beetles, or the fish, or how you can smash forty pallets with your bare hands, but it was _fun,_ right?"

Jasper squints at her, like she knows there's a trap here somewhere. "I let Lapis do the interacting, if we have to. They like her better."

"Why - "

A sudden rush of understanding hits her.

Trying to get Yarrow's End to like the witches will be _exactly_ like trying to persuade Mom to let her keep some new pet.

If it was another kitten like Fuzzy Winkerbean, it wouldn't take any persuasion at all - Lapis is like that, something small and battered and half-drowned, and Mom would be more likely to let them keep her because she's _cute_ and needs love. Whereas Jasper's the tarantula: too many eyes, too many legs, just _too much_ of everything, and it's all, "oh, Clover, put that outside, won't you? Don't look at me like that, it's a predator, it'll be okay," even though _cats_ are predators too and arachnids are just as useful as they are, look, Mom, here's a whole video on how beneficial to the environment they are, it's not their fault _you_ think they're big and creepy.

Adults are so _weird_ about these things.

"Ohhhhhh _hhhh,"_ comes out of her, her eyes very wide, and she brings her fist down on her open palm like a gavel. "Yes!"

Suspiciously, Jasper asks, "What?"

Sage and the older kids first, she thinks. They'll love whatever the adults tell them not to love.

"Tarantulas are the coolest, don't you think?" she says happily.

A shadow falls over them - well, over Clover, even seated on the locker like she is. She looks up at Jeremiah, who offers Jasper another joyful, peeled-open smile and then returns Clover's look. His eyes shoulder through the overgrowth of his eyebrows so he can meet her gaze directly.

"What is it?" she asks.

And Jeremiah says, "Call Tobias."

" _Ohh_ hhhhh - " Clover says, in a completely different tone, and her mouth forms over the worst swear word in her vocabulary, even if she isn't quite brave enough to vocalize it.

 

*

 

The trawler has chugged its way around the bird's nest shape of the island, coming up on the marina, but that's still a solid half-hour away and Jeremiah doesn't have Tobias's number programmed into his tablet. The witches don't even have a phone at all, but that doesn't come as much of a surprise to Clover, not if they rely on fire-breathing aardvark fusions to boil _water_ and get confused by a Roomba.

So she asks Lapis to fly her to shore. She can run into town from there.

The beach on this side of Yarrow's End is less rocky, the sand finer - the weekenders will almost always prefer this beach over the other one, even if it does mean risking the marsh to get here. 

"Thank you!" she calls over her shoulder and takes off at a sprint, sending sand spraying out from under her heels.

The ends of Jeremiah's sweater sleeves flap around as she pumps her arms. She should probably call Mom first - Tobias would have alerted her first thing when he woke up and found Clover gone. She had expected him to sleep all the way through her beetle expedition - she hadn't been prepared for witches.

The beach ends where the retreating tide has dried the sand into crests, reeds bravely poking their heads into the wind.

It's marsh past that point, wet flatland choked with vegetation and dangerous patches of sucking mud, stinking of driftwood and rot. But anybody who's island knows there are stepping stones to get through, worn free of opportunistic plant life by the tread of many feet, so Clover's already bending her knees and leaping before she can see where she's landing, confident she knows what's there - 

\- except the stone is occupied.

Clover catches a glimpse of shimmering green scales, contracting muscles, and a dark green gem embedded between two yellow eyes before the marsh snake arches its whole body, bares the cotton-colored inside of its mouth, and spits.

 

*

 

… 

 

*

 

………. 

 

*

 

CLOVER!

WE WERE WORRIED

SICK

 

*

 

NO MA'AM SHE'S MY SISTER PLEASE - 

 

*

 

EVERY

THING

 

falls

 

*

 

It's dark.

That's the first thing she sees when she opens her eyes, is dark and dark and more dark on every side.

The sea and the sky all blend together; purple-grey, frothing, and moonless. She knows she's by the bluff only because she can hear the wind in the cracks in the rock - all those stones, wailing in warning.

The island's too soupy with fog to see anything clearly besides the lighthouse and the quilted grid of Yarrow's End laid down in the middle, but -

Why is it way down there? Wait, is she - ? 

She's in the air! She's got to be at least - two hundred? Three hundred feet up, out to sea, like a National Geographic helicopter. 

Except she isn't! She's - !

"Yike!" she shrieks, and bicycles her feet in panic, expecting to plummet at any second. This isn't fair! She's already fallen off a cliff once today!

But she doesn't fall. She's _floating._

How can she be …

Below, she spots a tiny light at sea, bobbing frantically. At first, she thinks it's Jeremiah's trawler, but then she gets a better look and realizes it's the ferry - it's got to be on the last run of the night, for the kids who stay late for football or play practice. But it shouldn't be running, not when the sea's churning like that! Did someone make a mistake and read the weather wrong?

She no sooner wishes for the binoculars from her critter-catching case so she can get a better look than her vision suddenly telescopes down like she hit the zoom function on a camera. With perfect clarity, she sees the figures on the deck.

" _No!"_ she screams.

Common sense tries to tell her it'll be okay, they've almost reached the marina - if the storm gets worse and something happens, emergency services are not far away.

And then -

It's a monolith in the water, and it's like it doesn't come together until Clover's eyes make sense of all its component parts, one-by-one; a head, shoulders, a torso, the white froth of waves breaking around its thighs, and suddenly, there it is, hulking in the dark.

A giant.

There's a giant at sea.

It's made of a kind of metal the same multi-shaded blue as midnight, flushing briefly iridescent as the ferry's single searchlight swings across its knees. That light is a tiny pinprick against its bulk, and its head swivels - 

\- then drops, its own floodlight searing the ferry in turn.

With the monstrous groaning of robonoid parts, it steps forward, sending the water heaving in the ferry's direction, and Clover knows without a doubt that it's going to smash it, crush, _something,_ because sometimes when you look at a person (robot? alien?), you can just _tell_ that they wait with their foot poised for a bug to crawl underneath, and then crow with triumph at the smear its guts make.

The figures on the deck know it too - they scatter.

Clover paddles at the air, chanting, "No, no, _no, no!"_ repetitively, like that alone can stop what's going to happen.

But no matter how she kicks, treads her feet, or pinwheels her arms, she doesn't move. She's stuck.

Watching.

She fills her lungs. " _Somebody help!"_

And - 

It's the billowing from under the surface of the water that gives it away, like an incoming wave rolling in from the wrong direction. Clover zeroes in on it, and it vanishes.

A beat.

Two.

A massive green figure explodes out of the sea.

All six legs smash into the robonoid's chest, sending it staggering backwards in slow motion. Metal screams under the assault.

Clover sees a gleam of snarling pointed teeth, white hair tossed all around a formidable pair of shoulders like seafoam against stone. Water pours from murky, marsh-colored skin, stray droplets sent spinning into the dark like silver dollars. Five of those six hands find purchase, talons raking the robonoid's beetle shell.

The sixth is cranked back, and punches the robonoid straight in its lighted, lens-like eye.

It careens, struggling to keep its balance as water resistance pushes it to and fro, sloshing up against it like it's a spoon in a teacup. It twists its head away to protect the lens, and with a terrific screech of protesting hydraulics, it throws its torso to one side, then the other, trying to dislodge the monster.

In response, she laughs. 

It's a sea witch's laugh - there's no other way to describe it. It's a storybook sound.

Finally, as she pummels relentlessly at its head and shoulders, it hooks an arm around her waist and tears her away, plunging her deep underwater.

Clover makes a fishy gulping noise, horrified, but the crashing wave doesn't swamp the ferry.

The monster breaks the surface again, shaking her hair out of her face. 

Her body's jointed together as three sets of shoulders and arms, not unlike an insect's - a head, thorax, and abdomen, the latter two of which are covered in some kind of skintight black uniform, belted around the waist with a pattern of shooting gold stars. It's the second set of shoulders she bunches in preparation, and if Clover wasn't so terrified, she would be fascinated - how powerful would a breaststroke be on a monster that's all arms and ribs?

Two sets of eyes scan in different directions, and then suddenly snap together, focusing on a single point -

Below, on the ferry.

Fear flinches through her face, and she plunges forward, cutting through the waves like they aren't even there.

Seeing what she's doing, the robonoid dives for it, too.

"No!" Clover whimpers, because it's so much _closer,_ and she knows she doesn't want the robonoid to get to the ferry and the people onboard, but for all she knows, maybe the monster wants to crush it too!

But - 

With a roar of rushing seawater, a hand snatches the ferry up like it's a toy boat from a bath. It doesn't belong to the monster, and it doesn't belong to the robonoid.

It's made of water, like Lapis's.

Is she _here?_

Clover frantically cranes her neck, trying to see if she can spot Lapis's blue shape, either on the bluff or flying around or - 

Slowly, careful of its precious cargo, the hand retracts, coming to rest behind the monster's shoulder. She stops, treading water, and turns to face the robonoid. Clover feels her eyes widen - she's got Lapis's powers, too! They're made from the same stuff!

"Blue Diamond!" the monster snarls, in a startlingly deep baritone of a voice.

She hefts the amorphous shape of the hand up high, out of reach - Clover catches a glimpse of the figures on deck shouting at each other, and wants to cry.

Why are older kids so _dumb!_ Why won't they go below decks?

"Blue Diamond, I demand you confront me!"

There's a pause.

Then, like a veil lifting, a dozen smaller lenses blink open alongside the larger one, making the robonoid look like a spider with a hundred eyes. All of them are lit preternaturally blue in the dark, like the luminescent fish that Jasper had so very carefully cupped in her palms so that Clover could see.

A woman's voice crackles out. 

"And why should I answer an animal when it barks at me?" 

"I am no animal," the green monster replies, lips parting to show a smile that's all fangs, sharpened like a half-eaten candy cane. "I am Malachite, and you're losing. You've lost Earth, and now you're losing Homeworld, too. You thought you could crawl here and lick your wounds?"

The robonoid's eyes blink disinterestedly, which Clover takes to mean _yes._

"The Earth is under _my_ protection."

"The protection of a fusion?" The robonoid can't spit, but Clover gets the feeling it would if it could. "Abominable."

"A fusion that's stronger than anything you will ever be!" Malachite shouts back. "You build your spaceships and your paladins and your robonoids because you _can't make gems._ You can't have Earth just because you had Homeworld and you _wasted it."_

Hydraulics hiss; the robonoid clenches its fists.

"The life on this planet - you can't even _imagine_ what you'd squander if you used it up. I've never seen so many creatures capable of such beauty and community and compassion and _music."_

"And here we go," the woman's mechanical voice sparks with vitriol. "Back to Rose Quartz's precious humans."

"What?"

For the first time, Malachite looks wrong-footed. All four eyes blink in bafflement.

"No," she says blankly. "I mean, they're all right and I'm definitely not going to let you stomp on them, either. I was actually talking about whales. Did no one tell you about them? Do you _not know about whales?"_

Blue Diamond doesn't bother with a reply, its many lighted eyes flickering, and Clover decides that her initial impression had been wrong. It doesn't look like a spider at all, but an anemone - a creature with a thousand eyes, all blind.

Malachite shakes her head. 

"Whatever," she growls. "It doesn't change the fact that _you_ \- you are made of fear, and I am made of love, and you _will not win."_

With that, she slides her water-arm backwards, beaching the ferry safely upon the shore, and throws herself head-first at the machine that Blue Diamond is using as her avatar, bellowing a challenge. The robonoid lifts its arms to meet the strike.

So Clover - 

Clover's the only one who sees it, the lurch of that momentum as the ferry is set aside -

\- the figure on deck that loses her numb grip and slips, tumbling overboard.

She plummets one hundred, two hundred feet - the length of a football field, then another - a height a human cannot - _cannot survive._

The scarf around her head is clementine-colored.

Clover screams and screams and is not heard.

 

*

 

falls

 

THING

EVERY

 

*

 

She wakes up already choking.

Her face is wet with snot she can feel all the way down her chin, her cheek encrusted in sand. She must have been on the ground but she isn't anymore.

"Clover! _Clover!"_

Lapis's face is inches from her own, her eyes enormous and cloud-colored and frightened. She clutches Clover to her chest, and her voice cracks.

" _Clover - !"_

"Lapis, she's awake," Jasper interrupts, and Lapis's breath stutters.

They put their heads together, peering down at her with identical expressions - Clover couldn't tell you exactly what all she sees pouring across their faces, just that it's as cracked-open as she feels.

She opens her mouth to ask what happened - her corduroys are still uncomfortably wet from her swim, Jeremiah's wool sweater warm over them, so she hasn't gone anywhere (or any _when.)_ What _was_ that? It was nighttime, she was _flying,_ and her _sister -_

A sob escapes instead of words.

The rest cascade from there. It's the worst kind of crying - the kind you have no control over. It hijacks you, turns you into a heaving chest, a gross red face, a plugged-up nose, and in the middle of all of it, there's that terrible yawning feeling in your gut, like some new crater had been punched out of you. Clover teeters, then falls into it.

She leans up, wrapping her arms around their necks and clinging as her body shakes apart.

Jasper tolerates being bent at a weird angle for about ten seconds, and the next thing Clover knows, she shoves an arm under them both and lofts them up.

As one, Lapis and Jasper draw closer, arranging themselves so that Clover is firmly sandwiched between them - Lapis's arms tight around her, Jasper's arms tight around them both, so it's like being hugged twice. They're warmer even than Jeremiah's sweater.

A conversation happens over her head.

" - thought they weren't a danger to humans. They're just fragments of an emerald, not even big enough to be called centipeedles."

"Future vision," Jasper answers. Clover more feels the words rumbling through her than hears them. "There must have been an emerald in the army with future vision."

"That's … not a common emerald power."

"No, it isn't."

"So how could she have wound up in pieces on Earth? Having an ability that valuable - she would have been an aristocrat!"

"You don't get it. They would have vaulted her far above her station, not let her serve with her cohort on the ground. Leave your fellow soldiers behind to fight a war without you?" Jasper shakes her head. "Unthinkable. She must have kept it hidden."

"And then she got shattered."

"With time, those fragments fused with some local snake, but one retained just enough of her power … oh, Clover, we're sorry."

"It's _not - her - fault!"_ Clover interjects, feeling damp and disgusting but also very adamant about this point. She forces the words out through shuddering sobs. "It's nesting season! I should have - watched where - I was going. Mom said - Mom said - "

And she breaks down again, because _Mom._

Everything Mom warned her about came true, from falling off the cliff to the marsh snakes, but it's not Clover who got hurt.

It's going to be Sage.

"Nesting?" Jasper asks lowly, a frown in her voice.

"Must be - I've seen it. A phenomenon like the cluster. They gather together and try to heal the imperfections in each other's shards. They aren't sentient enough to try to reform, but the urge is there, I guess."

"And to humans, that's - "

Clover lets their voices wash over her. Her crying jag is winding down, but her insides feel as bruised as fruit, beaten up, and her mind keeps catching, backtracking, playing that awful scene over and over: Sage, knocked off the deck of the ferry, buried in water at the feet of monsters.

"Sage, Sage, _Sage,"_ she whimpers. 

She takes back everything she said - a Sage who annoys her on a daily basis is better than _no Sage at all._

Her grip around the witches' necks is a near stranglehold at this point, and she tries to let go, but Lapis's hand tucks her against her shoulder and Clover's in serious danger of crying again just from that.

"Not all futures seen come to pass," she says quietly. "Garnet said … she - Jasper, how did she explain it?"

Jasper shrugs her shoulders, jostling them both. 

"You're asking the wrong person," she says. "I spoke to her, like, twice."

"Jasper," Lapis says in a completely different tone. _You're supposed to be helping me here,_ it says. 

"What? Every time I walked into a room, she would make this _face._ Made me feel two inches tall, it was like - " Clover turns her head against Lapis's shoulder to see. Jasper compresses her mouth, just a fraction, and Clover doesn't know what it is about that, but seeing those exaggerated features try to make the subtle but unmistakable "this public restroom hasn't been cleaned" face loosens something in her chest, and she chuckles wetly.

Jasper's eyes go soft.

"We'll ask her about it," she says to Lapis. "But later, okay? We've got to return her to her people now."

"But - "

"She wouldn't have seen it unless there's something we can _do._ We'll protect her, Lapis."

"We'll protect them," Lapis echoes.

And Clover squeezes her eyes shut, hearing that deep voice: _Earth is under my protection!_

_Please, don't let them hurt my sister._

"Promise?" she croaks.

Jasper and Lapis exchange a look, tightly compacted with a dozen things, and then Lapis's hands come down, cradling Clover's face.

"Gather your witnesses," she tells her fiercely. "We'll swear an oath. A gem-sworn oath, Clover."

Clover hesitates, then scrubs at her nose with her sleeve. It makes a smeary mess, and Lapis grimaces, like she's just realizing she'd let that touch her shoulder.

"Okay," Clover says, and relaxes.

 

*

 

The road that winds its way up from town is empty, scrubby plant life becoming sparser the closer to the treacherous bluff it gets. Clover comes to a halt by the mailbox, sets her critter-catching case down, and rolls her heels in and out of her sneakers, trying to get rid of the gritty, sandy sensation.

" _Stay RIGHT THERE,"_ Tobias had bellowed at the most _unnecessary_ volume, so that Clover had to hold the phone away from her face, glowering. He wasn't even on speaker!

"I will!" she called back, at a distance.

"Don't _move._ I need to call Aisha and then I will be _right there,_ got it?"

"Got it."

" _RIGHT THERE."_

"Yup!" and then as soon as he hung up, "You're the one who took a nap. Don't know what you think you get to be so mad about."

A soft, saturated sound from behind her alerts her to Lapis's arrival, and she drops to the ground next to Clover, wings folding up and evaporating.

"You really don't know why he's mad?" she asks.

For a moment, Clover contemplates being stubborn about it, but Jasper hops over the crevasse that separates the bluff from the main road like it's nothing more than a crack in the sidewalk, coming up to join them, and she sighs. "He's mad because he was scared for me. I know, I know."

She hikes up the sleeves of Jeremiah's sweater (which she's going to keep until Mom makes her give it back, it's nice,) and then lifts the critter-catcher up, peering through the mesh into the interior.

"There's no way they're going to let me keep this, you know," she tells them with reluctance. "Not after today."

"Who says you have to show them?" Jasper says reasonably, and Lapis smacks her arm. "What? Weren't you telling me about how non-disruptive bugs are as pets? This one doesn't even need to eat like the rest of you organics do."

Clover grins.

Inside the case, the heaven beetle turns around to investigate, clicking curiously. She'd thought at first that it made the sound with its mandibles, or maybe even by snapping the hairs on its back legs together, but up close, she sees the beetle jerk its head, knocking its stone against the hard casing on its back. _Click, click, click._

"You're going to have to be quiet, okay?" She presses a finger to her lips. "No clicking. It's a dead giveaway."

The beetle flips its wings in response.

Clover checks to make sure she still has Sage's glove, then lets the case fall to her side, feeling buoyed. She's going to take all the crystal fragments she's collected over the years - and maybe ask Mr. Peewee for more, if he doesn't need them for his Paper - and make a habitat for her new friend. It'll go on the shelf - wait, no, maybe not on the shelf above Hamster the ferret, the shininess of something he can't reach will drive him to distraction. Between Gilly and the Tweedle-dees, maybe.

Down the road, a figure materializes on a bicycle.

Clover doesn't know how one manages to bicycle _angrily,_ but Tobias is managing it - long arms hooked outward from the handles, knees pumping aggressively at the pedals. Her good feeling diminishes, and she squirrels away the remainder for safe-keeping.

She turns to the witches.

"Thank you very much for saving my life and having a beach day with me," she says, very politely. "And thank you for talking to Tobias."

They had done a very good job, she thought. They sounded responsible and trustworthy the whole time they were on the phone, the way adults talk to other adults about children when those children were present, even if Clover could see them throw panicked looks at each other.

"See you, little plant," Jasper lifts a hand.

Lapis looks scandalized. "Don't call her that!"

"Aren't clovers a plant? Did I get that wrong? I thought it was weird, I didn't think humans came in plant form."

Clover leaves them whispering furiously to each other and starts walking down the road to meet the approaching angry mailman.

_Please,_ she imagines saying to him - him and Sage and Cheree and Mr. Peewee and Yokeisha the utilities inspector and Agnes Los Altos and anybody who will stand still and listen. _Please, can we keep them?_

" _Oh!"_ she turns back. "Wait! Do you want to be called witches or do you have another name?"

Jasper tilts her head. She and Lapis have a quick discussion with their eyebrows.

"We're not witches at all."

"We're the Crystal Gems," Lapis says matter-of-factly. "We're aliens from outer space."

Jasper's broad gesture encompasses the bluff, the cottage, and the communication chamber hidden underneath, and says, "We're guarding our top secret alien landing site," like telling Clover doesn't ruin the 'top secret' part.

Lapis adds, "We'll live peacefully alongside you humans until our spaceship comes back for us."

"Oh," says Clover.

And then, because the situation finally warrants it and she can hear the _exact_ tone Sage will use to say "I told you so":

" _Darn."_

 

 

 

-  
fin

**Author's Note:**

> And that's how Clover fell in love with gem shards, vowed to take care of all of Earth's fragmented creatures, and got Sage involved in magic stuff (although Sage makes a point to never say "magic.") Twenty years later, if you ask the younger kids in Yarrow's End about the two women who live in the stone cottage on the bluff, they'll say, "oh, you mean the witch sisters? They're super nice. If you want to visit them and pet the fire-breathing aardvark, you should call ahead so they can get the rope ladder strung up for you!"
> 
>  
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/), if you're into that kind of thing!


End file.
